But the most useful thing King Tarquin did was the building of a great sewer through the city and into the Tiber. Before his time there were no sewers in Rome, though the places between the hills were swampy and wet. This made many parts of the city very unhealthy. Tarquin's sewer drained the swamps and carried the water into the river. It crossed the entire city. It was so high and wide that men could sail into it in boats, and it was so strongly built that it has lasted to the present time. The great sewer is still in use.

Tarquin wanted very much to change one of the laws about the army, but an augur named told him such a thing could not be done without a sign from the gods. This made the king angry, and he thought he would try to show that the augurs had not the power or knowledge they were supposed to have, so he said to Attius:

"Come, now, I will give you a question. I am thinking whether a certain thing I have in my mind can be done or not. Go and find out from your signs if it can be done."

Navius went away, and shortly afterwards returned and told the king that the thing could be done. Then Tarquin said:

"Well, I was thinking whether or not you could cut this stone in two with this razor. As you say it can be done, do it."

Navius took the razor and immediately cut the stone in two with the greatest ease. The king never again doubted the power of the augurs.

Servius was a very good king. He had many good laws made and, like King Numa Pompilius, he divided some of the public lands among the poor people of the city.

One of the important things Servius did was to finish the wall round the city which Tarquin had begun. This wall was very high. It was made of stone and earth, and on the outside there was a ditch a hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep. There were several gates in the wall, but they were all well guarded night and day by soldiers, so that no enemy could enter.

King Servius was the first to have a census taken in Rome. He made a rule or law that once every five years all the people should assemble in the Campus Martius to be counted. The word census  is a Latin word, meaning a counting or reckoning, and so we use it in our own country for the counting of the people which takes place every ten years.

Servius Tullius was killed by King Tarquin's son, who was also called Tarquin but got the name of Superbus, or Proud, because he was a very haughty and cruel man. The dead body of Servius was left lying on the street where he had been killed, and Tullia, wife of the wicked Tarquin and daughter of the murdered king, drove her chariot over it.

Tarquin the Proud now became king. It was during his reign that the Books were brought to Rome. These books were not like our books. They were merely three bundles of loose pieces of parchment, having moral sentences on them written in the Greek language. This is the story of how the books were obtained:

One morning an old woman came to King Tarquin, carrying nine books in her hands. She offered to sell them to the king, but when she named a large sum as the price he laughed at her and ordered her away. The next day the woman came again, but with only six books. She had burned the other three. She offered to sell the six, but she asked the same price that she had asked the day before for the whole nine. The king again laughed at her and drove her away.

The same day Tarquin went to visit the augurs in their temple, and he told them about the old woman and her books. The augurs declared that she was certainly a sibyl and that her books doubtless contained important predictions about Rome.

The sibyls were women who pretended to be able to foretell events. There were sibyls in many countries, but the most famous of them all was the Sibyl of a town in the south of Italy. This was the sibyl who brought the books to Tarquin.

Tarquin was now sorry he had not taken the books, and he hoped the woman would come again. She did come on the following day, but she had only three books instead of six. She had burned the other three the day before. The king was very glad to see her, and he bought the remaining three books, but he had to pay just as much for them as the old woman had asked at first for the nine. Then the Sibyl disappeared, and was never seen again.

The ordinary books the Romans had were not like the Sibylline Books. They had no printed books, for printing was not known for many centuries after. Their books were written with pens made of reeds. Their paper was made of the pith of a plant called the papyrus, and from this name the word paper  is derived. To make a book they cut the paper into leaves or pages, and after writing on them they pasted the pages one to another sidewise until all the pages of one book were put together. This long strip was made into a cylindrical roll, and was called a volume, from the Latin word volumen, a roll. When the volume was being read it was held in both hands, the reader unrolling it with one hand and rolling it with the other.

The Sibylline Books were put in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. Two officers were appointed to keep watch over them. Whenever the Romans were going to war, or had any serious trouble, they would consult the books. The way they did it was this: one of the officers would open the stone chest where the books were kept and take out the first piece of parchment he laid his hand on. Then the Greek sentence found on the piece would be translated into Latin. It was sometimes very hard to tell what the sentence really meant. Often they had to guess. When they made sense out of it they said that it was a prophecy of the Sibyl and would surely come to pass.